Ali Saleh Khalah al Marri, an al Qaeda sleeper agent who returned to the U.S. on September 10, 2001, has agreed to a plea bargain with federal prosecutors. Al Marri was held as an enemy combatant by the Bush administration (the only one held in the continental U.S.) since 2003, and then the Obama administration decided to prosecute al Marri’s case. That prosecution has now ended in a deal that could net al Marri 15 years in prison.
The ACLU and lefty activists have advocated for al Marri repeatedly. Based on their rhetoric, you would think that the Bush administration was more of a danger to America than terrorists such as al Marri, who was sent by top 9-11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) to orchestrate follow-on attacks against American citizens. In July of 2008, for example, the New York Times took advocacy on behalf of al Marri’s case to new lows. The Times editorial board wrote:
In reality, al Marri’s battlefield was to be right here in America. KSM tasked him with investigating several types of attacks, including poisoning water reservoirs. As part of his plea bargain, al Marri admitted that KSM had sent him to the United States and that he communicated via coded messages with the master terrorist after the September 11 attacks. And among the evidence accumulated against al Marri was his laptop, which was loaded with al Qaeda propaganda videos, unsent messages to KSM, and research on cyanide and sulfuric acid. This is hardly “extremely thin hearsay evidence,” as the Times would have it.
Al Marri’s plea bargain explains the purpose of his chemicals research (emphasis added):
In other words, al Marri was in the midst of plotting an attack using a form of cyanide gas on “dams, waterways, and tunnels in the United States” when he was captured.
This is the man whose case “raises critically important issues for a free society,” the New York Times argued.
What al Marri’s case really demonstrates is that some cannot tell the difference between American citizens and al Qaeda sleeper agents (including those, like al Marri, who gamed the system to obtain legal residency) who are sent to this country to kill them. Lefty lawyers have complained ad nauseam about al Marri’s detention, claiming that the entire U.S. constitutional order was at stake. This perspective was taken to extreme lengths, to the point that some, like the Times, even pretended that the case against al Marri was weak.
Meanwhile, al Marri was KSM’s hit man and planned the indiscriminate massacre of American citizens on behalf of al Qaeda. Al Marri and his master could not care less about the U.S. Constitution or a “free society.” As for the ACLU and the Times, well, someone needs to be al Qaeda’s “useful idiots.”
